Elizabeth Kolbert On Tech Panglossism, Geoengineering And Other Examples Of Clouded Vision
EDIT
You also touch on geoengineering in that chapter, and you spent a lot of time with Ken Caldeira who in addition to his ocean acidification work, did some of the first serious modeling of the feasibility of cooling the earth by injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. What do you make of geoenginnering options — and I know that’s a wide spectrum — as potential weapons in our arsenal for combating climate change?
I’ve talked to Ken about this and he’d be the first to say: “Geoengineering might be something that helps get society through a really potentially bad patch, but it has a lot of complexities.” It’s really clear the benefits are very uneven. There are real questions about rainfall patterns and things like that. Even if it were practically possible, which I’m going to pass over for the moment.
A scheme where we’re shooting sulfates into the stratosphere, that doesn’t deal with ocean acidification. It just makes it worse and worse. And once you get into a situation with geoengineering, it commits you. If you were to geoengineer using sulfates and then you stopped, you’d get this fantastic and very fast run up in temperatures. So you’re committing yourself forever. And if you were also at the same time increasing the Co2 concentration in the atmosphere, then you’re committing yourself to more and more sulfate, because they have to balance out.
Paul Crutzen (who shared the Nobel Prize in 1996 for work on the “formation and decomposition of ozone”) wrote a paper saying we may have to consider this, because we’re not doing anything else and we’re going to be so thoroughly screwed. But it’s not something I’d recommend. I don’t think it’s the path most likely to lead to a happy outcome for people or anything else.
EDIT
http://recode.net/2014/03/23/elizabeth-kolbert-on-how-tech-can-and-cant-tackle-climate-change-and-extinction/
